About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Report from the Consilience conference, part III

Last day of the consilience conference! We began with David Sloan Wilson, with whom I had just had a spirited (and constructive) discussion about how to measure individual and group cultural selection quantitatively (he admitted it hasn’t been done, yet...). His topic was “Using evolution to improve the quality of life.” According to David, evolutionary principles can be used to improve our quality of life at the level of cities and neighborhoods. His Evolutionary Institute is a think tank that has the explicit goal of connecting evolutionary ideas to public policy.

Wilson sees symbolic thought as an inheritance system, which is necessary to get a theory of cultural evolution off the ground if one excludes fuzzy concepts like memes (which he apparently is inclined to do). He proposes the idea of a “symbotype”-phenotype relationship similar to the standard genotype-phenotype relationship in evolutionary biology. (Though it has to be noted that genotype-phenotype mapping is one of the most difficult problems facing evolutionary biologists, and I doubt that it’s going to be any easier to operationalize the concept of symbotype-phenotype mapping.)

David’s example was a study of prosociality in Binghamton, NY neighborhoods. He geo-mapped individuals who had been scored on a measure of prosociality. He then ran statistical analyses exploring the social correlatives of prosociality on the territory. Prosociality turned out to vary over very small spatial scales. The survey found a strong correlation between the prosociality of individuals and that of their social environment (i.e., the more socially supportive the environment is, the more prosocial people are). Multiple forms of social support contribute to individual prosociality, and adolescents changing location within the city is taken by Wilson to demonstrate phenotypic plasticity. (I actually worked on phenotypic plasticity as it is understood in biology, and I think this is a somewhat metaphorical use of the term.)

This was all very interesting, and even useful from a practical (policy) perspective. But it is social science, the results are unlikely to surprise a social scientist, and the e-word did not add anything at all, as far as I could see, to the whole picture. Evolution has to do with fitness-related variation and inheritance. There were no measures of fitness in the data, and it’s hard to see in what sense an individual changing behavior from one year to another (e.g., moving to a different neighborhood) counts as “inheritance.” But maybe I missed something crucial, somewhere.

Next we moved to Barbara Oakley, on cold-blooded kindness: insights into pathological altruism. This is a situation where while the underlying motivation is to help others, the altruistic behavior has irrational and substantially negative consequences to the other and to the self. An example presented by Oakley was of a woman who married a drug addict and then killed him in self-defense. (More on this below.)

Oakley comes to this as an engineer, and she seeks analogies between engineering and social science principles. For instance, she takes the idea that local decreases in entropy must be offset by a broader increase in entropy in the environment (which is a fundamental principle of physics) and translates it into the idea that even good deeds can carry negative consequences in the human realm. This, honestly, seems to be a stretch, and not a novel insight, given that both social scientists and philosophers have explored the idea of consequentialism in detail, and without needing to reference entropy.

(I’m beginning to think that it would have been nice to have actual social scientists, historians and assorted humanists at this conference, just to see how they would have reacted to biology-based criticism of their fields. Another time, maybe.)

Back to the story of the woman who killed her husband. Apparently, it wasn’t self-defense at all, it was premeditated (he was shot in the back, and she had pre-dug his grave). She was also a sadomasochist, who had complained in the past that her husband refused to hurt her. Oakley contends that the fact that reporters for the National Inquirer (where she originally heard of the story) and others felt sympathy for the woman and bought into her side of the story (though apparently neither the prosecutor nor the jury did) is because we are at fault for excessive (pathological) altruism. Again, that seems a stretch. First, if we were given the actual facts, instead of the National Inquirer version, I bet very few people would have felt compassion for the woman. Second, this case needs to be understood against a cultural background — which Oakley did refer to — of a number of stories of battered women who do act, truly, in self-defense. None of the above, as interesting as it was, had much to do with consilience, as far as I could tell.

Next: Jonathan Gottschall on the storytelling animal, how stories make us human. We all know that we like fiction and stories, but we are not aware of just how much. Storytelling is about someone else in a sense taking over emotional control of your self for a while. We don’t leave storytelling when we go to sleep: dreams, whatever actual physiological function they have, are fragments of stories which the brain tells itself. And then there is daydreaming, in which we apparently spend a large chunk of our day (this includes, however, rethinking past actions and situations, or imagining how to handle likely future actions and situations).

The left hemisphere of the brain is known to be a storyteller, in charge of making sense of everything that happens to us. The downside is that when it doesn’t have reliable information the left “interpreter” will make up stories anyway. Classical experiments show that even simple moving geometrical shapes on a screen are interpreted by many people as agents interacting with each other, driven my motives. (To be fair, since Gottschall showed an example on screen, the shapes were moving around the screen in obviously non random fashion. Would people make up stories if the movements were random?)

Fictional stories have surprisingly wide ranging effects, for instance in the case of the (alleged) role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the events that led to the American Civil War. Or D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, credited with (temporarily) reviving the then moribund Ku Klux Klan.

Why storytelling? It could be the result of sexual selection, or a byproduct of the way the human mind works, and there are other possibilities. Gottschall seems to favor a pluralist answer, with multiple causes for the origin of story telling propensities in humans. The obvious question is how one would go about testing these hypotheses.

Fiction has a “universal grammar”: character + predicament + attempted solution. Right, and not really surprising. Of course this tells you close to nothing about individual stories and how they vary with culture and time, but point taken. If story telling has a function, it may be a sort of “flight simulator” of the mind, through which we practice for life (do we need to practice possible encounters with zombies?). There is some preliminary evidence, apparently, that people who enter into fictional simulation more often do better in real life.

The first speaker of the afternoon was Henry Harpending, on kinship within populations: whole genomes as green beards. The green beards refer to Dawkins’ (hypothetical) example of people with green beards being inclined to help others sporting the same trait, a process undermined by how easy it is to fake a green beard. This is obviously relevant to the idea of kin selection-mediated altruism and how it is vulnerable to cheaters. Harpending asked how much evidence do we have for mechanisms of kin recognition (to counter cheaters) having evolved in humans. Not much, apparently.

Harpending went on to compare two versions, from research in the ‘70s, of “Mr. Natural”: on the one hand the cooperative and peaceful bushmen of the Kalahari desert; on the other hand the Yanomamo of the Amazons, fierce and aggressive. The question, naturally, is how can these two so different cultures both represent “Mr. Natural”? The most recent take is that there is no such thing as Mr. Natural, that people’s ways of living change rapidly from time to time and culture to culture.

After that excursion, Harpending returned to kinship, and how these days we can actually measure it via Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), an increasing large database which is becoming available for humans through projects like 23andme (a commercial genome sequencing enterprise). The result seems to be that there is not enough dispersion of kinship values in, say, the modern French or Japanese populations, to make it effective to deploy cryptic kinship detection mechanisms. However, this does not hold for small human populations, like the inhabitants of Surui island. In that case there is a significant spread of kinship coefficients.

Again, while much of this was interesting, it wasn’t at all clear to me what it had to do, if anything, with the theme of the conference. It isn’t unusual for people to be invited to a conference with a central theme, show up and then talk about whatever struck their fancy most recently. But there seemed to be a particularly high occurrence of this at the consilience conference.

The next speaker was Pascal Boyer, on “the dark matter of human history, the perils of cognition blindness.” Social science “that matters” needs to address questions like why people engage in warfare, why is there religion, and so on. Boyer is explicitly using the term consilience as synonymous with integration of disciplines, which is, again, different from E.O. Wilson’s use of the term.

Boyer uses an analogy with dark matter in physics to signify that there is quite a bit in social science that does not meet the eye, and that has to do with the neuro-cognitive processes underlying conscious mental states, motivations, social interactions etc. Parts of human nature are not accessible to conscious inspection and cognition awareness requires effort. This notwithstanding, intuitive (or “folk”) sociology takes an intentional stance to groups and states (memories, beliefs), so that behavior can be interpreted as goal-directed.

For Boyer intuitive sociology may be adaptive in the context of our social evolution, as we can trace what happens around us as the result of intentions by other people. However, intuitive sociology fails when it is applied to, for instance, understanding the economy (“folk economics”). An example, apparently, is the idea of rent controls. They make sense from the point of view of folks economics, because the landlord and the lodger are given intentional stances; they don’t make sense for economists because offers depend on preferences and availability of means in the relevant population. (This seems to entirely ignore the fact that rent control measures are usually implemented not to solve an economic problem, but to minimize negative social side effects of purely economic “solutions.”)

Boyer also criticized political science for having empirical basis but no theory, resulting in either formal modeling that does not make contact with empirical reality or the study of political preferences as brute facts.

After a long bit on warfare and ethnic conflict, where he stressed the same contrast between “folk” and more sophisticated theories of what goes on, Boyer concluded by stating that there is no such thing as religion. We expect of religions that they have doctrines, beliefs, personnels (priests, shamans, etc.), and domains of competence, such as survival after death, morality, etc.. But in reality, in most cases at the tribal level — argues Boyer — there is no doctrine at all, the personnel is varied and ad hoc, and there is no unified domain of religion. Seems to me that here as in other examples during the talk there is a confusion between origins on one hand and development and maintenance on the other hand of a given phenomenon. Religions may have originated without the characteristics of the modern stuff, but this neither licenses the bold claim that religion “doesn’t exist,” nor does it imply that things like modern religions doctrines, beliefs, personnel etc. don’t need to be understood on their own terms. Boyer is correct, however, in separating the issue of religion as a type of social organization that is typical of some human societies from supernaturalism, which seems to be a human universal. A consequence he derives is that it makes no sense to think of religion as an adaptation, as it is far too much of a late comer in human evolution.

The take home message is that the social sciences have been disappointing because they have not addressed the big questions, leading to no cumulative progress. (The latter, I think, is a bit uncharitable.) Things went wrong because of the lack of vertical integration, in this case a reduction to neuroscience. Again, Boyer seems to be making a couple of common mistakes at this conference. First, integration and reduction are different things. Second, reduction does not eliminate the higher level phenomena, it only helps explaining them. So, I think, social science should still focus on the high level targets, but also integrate as much as possible notions from other disciplines, including but not limited to neuroscience.

And last: Patricia Churchland on how the mind makes morals. Darwin (together with Hume and Aristotle) thought that our moral sense is the result of social instincts, habits and reason. Churchland’s basic hypothesis is that sociability is of value for social mammals and it evolved by natural selection; its neural “hub” is the hormone oxytocin (involved in attachment, bonding); this is augmented by the reward system in the brain; and the whole thing is elaborated by prefrontal structures in the brain.

Attachment and trust are the platform for moral values. Social problem solving is mediated by the enlarged prefrontal cortex, which overrides, represses, calculates and plans. Refreshingly, Churchland isn’t trying to “reduce” culture to neurobiology, she is after the much more sensible goal of understanding the neural structures that make it possible for us to have culture to begin with.

She cites Eleanor Rosch’s work on the “radial” structure of concepts, with a prototype at the center and fuzzy boundaries. (This is similar to family resemblance in Wittgenstein, which a philosopher like Churchland should have noted.) Social categories are also radial, including the category of “moral.” Interestingly, artificial neural networks “learn” to categorize by way of prototypical structures and fuzzy boundaries. The idea, of course, is that the brain is relevantly similar to neural networks, and likely learns in a similar fashion (which is interesting, but let’s not forget that the brain — unlike neural networks — comes with a great deal of genetic-developmental prewiring).

One final comment on the entire conference: I got the impression that a number of participants did not actually read Wilson’s Consilience, at least not recently (several have admitted as much to me). Many (though not all) seemed to be convinced that the book promotes a positive and multi-directional exchange between disciplines, particularly crossing the science-humanities divide. It does nothing of the sort. It is a clear attempt at a reductionist program of subsuming the humanities into the sciences, and particularly biology, though it isn’t obvious why Wilson didn’t go all the way and subsume biology itself into physics. Perhaps because he’s a biologist?

—
Interesting footnote: one of the conference attendees heard that I was blogging about it, and objected to it, on two grounds: first, I am bringing to an outside forum discussions and opinions that were not meant for that forum; second, I get to editorialize and comment about what was said at the conference, while the other participants can’t.

My response is that conferences of this type are public events (registration was open to everyone), and that bringing at least a flavor of the proceedings to a wider audience is a good thing (at least another participant was Tweeting about it, by the way). As for commenting, well naturally I am writing this, so you are getting my take on it. Presumably, the intelligent reader is aware of this and will take it into account in forming her own judgment. Moreover, once my thoughts are out in the blogosphere other participants can either comment on them directly or can use other forums to respond to and/or expand upon them.

Still, the question does raise interesting issues concerning the ethics of blogging from academic conferences (or in other situations), and I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this.

63 comments:

It is quite clear how you feel about evo-psych. But just to clarify your position: do you think *all* evo-psych hypotheses are untestable, or just *some*? Do you think that what George Williams referred to as "evidence of special design" can offer probabilistic support for evo-psych hypotheses, or do you think that this kind of research is bunk? For instance, if I marshalled a great deal of evidence showing how fiction improves performance in imagined activities, how the elements of stories are closely-linked to problems that would have faced our ancestors (e.g. predators, infidelity), how enjoyment of stories is highly associated with relevance to these problems, how enjoyment decreases when the story is about problems unknown to our ancestors (e.g. tax fraud), how brain activity in simulated activities is nearly identical with brain activity in actual activities, and how daydreaming/mental rehearsal increases the more the activity is perceived as important, would this at all increase your confidence that the "flight simulator" hypothesis was at least partly correct? If not, why not?

How about ancestral strategies that no longer attain to modern problems? Much great fiction is more concerned with that than your opposite scenario. We change our cultures so that culture will in turn change us, and oral stories through written literature have always been the accelerator of change. They've also become the necessary addition to the more personal experiences that would otherwise have taken us eons to evolve with. And yes, we do evolve our intelligent strategies in direct concert with experience.

Thanks, Roy. I don't doubt that fiction can inspire political and personal change. I don't necessarily endorse the "flight simulator" hypothesis; I'm just arguing that it is a scientifically testable hypothesis. Note that even if the hypothesis were true, that would not mean that simulation is the *only* function of fiction; it could just be one of many different functions. Of course, how different cultures currently engage our fiction-mechanisms is an entirely different question, and just as interesting in my opinion.

under those (very unlikely) circumstances, one would have to conclude that the trait is currently advantageous. Whether it evolved by natural selection, was an exaptation, or a spandrel, remains to be seen and depends on how much information we reliably have on the ancestral environment.

As you can see, unlike Williams and Dennett, I set the bar pretty high for claims of adaptation. Claims of current advantage (sometimes called "aptation"), on the other hand, are much easier to make.

Thanks for the reply, Massimo. But aren't such claims of exaptation even more untestable than claims of adaptation, as the latter entail textured predictions while the former do not? Can't we wave our hands and say "spandrel" no matter how functionally sophisticated the trait is? My point is that we should be probabilistic. The more evidence of functional organization, the more heavily we should weight the probability of adaptation over spandrel or noise. Can we at least agree on that premise? Or do you not buy into the idea that natural selection is the only process we know of that can give rise to functional complexity?

I wasn't preferring spandrels or exaptations to adaptation, I was making a common methodological point when there are competing explanations at play. Yes, strong functional considerations to tilt the balance in favor of adaptation, but - again - current utility is not enough to prove historical selection. I'm simply concerned that it is far too easy, particularly when plastic human behavior is concerned, to slide into the adaptive hypothesis by default. It isn't.

Thanks again, Massimo. I think we're basically in agreement, except that you set the bar higher for functional evidence than I, Williams, and Dennett do.

My beef, however, is with the insinuation that evopsych hypotheses are untestable, when both you and I agree that such hypotheses can be tested via functional considerations. Yes, teasing out alternative hypotheses is more difficult with humans, but "difficult to test" is not the same as "impossible to test," and at times, you appear to conflate the two. If there weren't such widespread disagreement on what is "difficult to test" -- from Williams and Dennett on one end of the continuum to you and Gould on the other -- I would forgive the conflation. But since your views do not reflect the consensus, I find it disingenuous. I hope you will be more cautious in the future.

it isn't a question of being disingenuous (which would imply ideologically driven deception on my part), it is that I am - as you point out - closer to the Gould than the Dennett side of the spectrum. I did not say that evopsych hypotheses are impossible to test, only, often, very difficult. I and Jonathan Kaplan expand on this in a full chapter of Making Sense of Evolution, Chicago Press.

What is particularly difficult is that behaviors (unlike, say, morphological features) are much too plastic to disentangle the currently advantageous vs historically adaptive possibilities, especially if we are talking about the behavior of beings who can reflect upon them and change them accordingly.

Here's D. S. Wilson on memes: "The meme concept, of course, has a number of meanings, and the most general definition of "memes" is just newspeak for culture. Use the word culture, take it out, and put in the word "meme" - and so the broad usage, that broad usage of "memes", "cultural evolution", of course applies not just to parasitic memes, "memeplexes", the group level, just about all of the different evolutionary hypotheses can be given a meme formulation when "meme" is used in that general formulation." That seems a teensy bit muddled - but he at least fairly clearly acknowledges the validity of memetic models and terminology.

Disagreed. A fundamental difference is that cultural information and cultural 'phenotype' are often not distinct. As you and Massimo describe it, there seems to be no difference between the meme and the symbotype of Wilson. Both seem to assume such a distinction.

Cultural evolution is characterised by the diversity of infomation channels through which a certain culture element can be transmitted that is almost matching the diversity of phenotypes.

For example, simple artefacts can be reverse-engineered (the information being the artefact), or the information can be gleaned from paintings, patents, given orally, etc.

Suppose we have a range of historical records for a certain artefact, say a Roman catapult. We have antique remnants of the weapon itself, written accounts, paintings, etc. How do you pin down the meme or symbotype?

Just like generations of memeticists, Wilson advocates a deep relationship between organic and cultural evolution - saying: "The analogy between genetic evolution and cultural evolution is anything but superficial."

We don't inherit cultural information, we inherit learned strategies for improved behaviors, which then become learned behaviors, and it takes a very long time in most cases for such learned and then relearned experiences to become heritable as genomically imprinted strategies.

What is the use of defining a bit of cultural information as a meme, if cultural information does not come in indentifyable units but is fussy? Admittedly, cultural information is all around us, here in blog entries, there in books, paintings, tv-programms, etc. etc. But the meme or symbotype enters a distinction between meme (cultural information) and phene (cultural expression) that does not exist. The cultural expression is very often also the cultural information. Hence it is a useless distinction.

Memes and meme products is *not* a "useless" distinction! Think recipe and cake, for example. Or think computer program and GUI.

*Some* cultural entities are too primitive to have very much in the way of separate meme products, though that was once true in the organic realm as well, our earliest ancestors were probably "naked genes".

Do you have some more specific claims? For instance do you deny that any of: drift, selection, adaptation, kin selection, group selection, linkage, hitchhiking, convergent evolution, the founder effect, ontogeny, phylogeny and the gene's eye view also apply to human culture?

Massimo seems not to believe that cultures offer any experiences that the process of evolution by stochastic mutation pays initial heed to. He, like Dawkins, seems to think it works the other way around, that our mutations come first and are subject to subsequent approval in a cultural setting. Memes were invented to explain how learned behaviors evolved separately from the physical selection process. That idea didn't seem to work either, and neoDarwinists now explain behaviors as somehow changing in concert with an organism's newly formed physical necessities. Those who now refer to the mutation process as self adaptive disagree. Memes in either case are no longer needed, although accidents of nature still grease the evolutionary wheels.

Tim Tyler"Memes and meme products is *not* a "useless" distinction! Think recipe and cake, for example. Or think computer program and GUI."

Okay, maybe the distinction can be drawn in a few cases, but even there the cultural product came before the code. For example, inventiones have been made long before they've become codified in patents.

In biological evolution there is one common code, except for some minor variations, undelying all the phenetic diversity. In culture all sorts of codes, artefacts, etc. are derivative of one animal's behavioural make-up. What then is a meme - a computer program, a recipe, a patent, or something yet to be found in human neurons but not, say, beetle neurons?

Memes come before meme products - practically by definition. Inventions that are the result of individual learning alone are not really a counter-example. They aren't based on memes, but they aren't the product of memes either. They depend on the evolution of copied thoughts - "protomemes", if you like - generated by individual learning within a single mind. You have to understand the coevolution of socially-learned memes with individually-learned "protomemes" to make sense of how the mind works.

The nearest thing to a universal memetic code is the one that translates between neural representations of socially-learned information and motor action. There's also another code that translates the other way around, inverting the operation. We don't yet understand the details of how these two codes operate - because they are incredibly complex - but that's OK - one day this important pair of memetic codes will be cracked.

I take "memes" to refer to bits of heritable cultural information. So, the information used to manufacture traffic signs are the most obvious memes associated with them. But sure, people do sometimes copy the symbols on the signs.

'am pretty sure that traffic signs and the information they code for came long after traffic has become a cultural trait.

With this approach we'd end up with lots of disparate codes (and memes) that are all derived from cultures and not their origin. That's also the reason why memes, thus understood, will never become central to understanding cultural evolution. The evidence does not lead back to some common ur-memes. Genes produced brains, human brains produced cultures, and in cultures precipitated all sorts of codes. Memes in these codes are not the cause of the cultures, even if some of them have gone wild and are like parasites now.

The term 'meme' isn't vacuous if you define it. There are lots of definitions of "gene" too - they don't stop people from doing useful work with the concept.

Genes - like memes - are portable. They exist in databases and on magnetic and optical storage media these days - as well as being in organic formats. Those who think otherwise should update their concept of "gene" to bring it into line with 21th century phenomena such as gene sequencing and genetic engineering.

Memetics - like genetics - faces the problem of how to map heritable information onto its immediate expression. In genetics, that map is referred to as the "genetic code" - so it makes a lot of sense to refer to the same kinds of map in memetics as being "memetic codes".

Joachim D. - I don't have culture coming before memes, since memes mediate culture - they're the heritable information responsible for it. We are probably using different notions of what "culture" refers to - which is a common problem in this kind of discussion. However, you should be advised that - for some common definitions of "culture" - memes really do underpin and act as the basis of it.

Are you familiar with G. C. Williams - and his information-theory-based genetics? He defined the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency." He says genes are informational: "The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution."

To grok memetics, understanding this information-theory based notion of the gene is highly recommended. It also helps with understanding our distant ancestors and descendants to grasp that genes are not necessarily made out of nucleic acids.

The molecular-biology notion of a "gene" is not very useful when generalising Darwinism. It's a pity that they use the same word, looking at the confusion that has resulted.

not only I am familiar with Williams' work, I was his colleague at Stony Brook for a number of years. I doubt he said what you wrote up there, and if he did, he did not mean it literally. A gene plays its function because of the information it carries, but it *is* a biomolecule made in a certain way and using certain chemicals. Inside a computer hard drives genes do precisely nothing - even though all the information is there.

The source is his chapter in "The Third Culture." The full text is free on the internet - so it is easy to verify the source. George also wrote there:

"In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality. They're patterns. I was also influenced by Dawkins' "meme" concept, which refers to cultural information that influences people's behavior."

As I say, it's pretty important to understand this information-theory perspective on the gene if trying to understand memetics. Dawkins also offered an information-theory-based view of the gene with his "active germ-line replicator" concept.

The position that genes "are always made of RNA or DNA" seems indefensible to me. "Gene" is an overloaded word that has also been used to cover heritable information. That meaning is a vastly more important concept than "heritable information encoded in nucleic acids". This superior concept is deserving of our best word.

where you on a first-name basis with Williams? Regardless, he is just wrong, making an elementary confusion between what a gene is (a particular type of biomolecule) and its abstract description (a series of bit of information). That confusion is particularly obvious when you try to answer the question of what do genes do when you store them in hard drives (nothing). That sort of confusion also makes the idea of memes meaningless, since the first element (a particular biomolecule) is entirely missing. But I don't expect to convince you, so this is probably my last comment on the matter (which is pretty peripheral to the topic of the post anyway).

Right. So, you think G. C. Williams is making an "elementary confusion" about genes. Is that really plausible? G. C. Williams is a widely recognised expert on the topic of genes. He inspired Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene". A much more sensible explanation is that he wasn't confused at all - and instead was dissatisfied with the idea of genes as bits of nucleic acid - and so generalised the concept to make it more useful.

Anyway, if you aren't aware of the idea of genes as information - as promoted by G. C. Williams - then that's the problem right there. Memetics builds on top of this work. You really have to at least be aware of this information-theoretic conception of a "gene" to fully understand why memes are named after genes.

it would help the dialogue if you turned down the smugness dial a bit. I am a professional biologist and a philosopher of science, I can assure you that I know of the theoretical-information concept of genes.

Still, that concept if best understood as trying to *abstract* the properties of genes from their specific (historical) substrate, not to make them *independent* of such substrates. Which is why it makes no sense to say that genes can be stored in a hard drive. Their information content can, it's an important distinction.

Genes (in the sense discussed here) *are* a form of information. They don't *have* an information content - they *are* the information content. That's just how they are defined - e.g. see:

"In evolutionary theory, a gene could be defined as any hereditary information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times the rate of endogenous change" - Williams 1966, page 25.

The idea that memes are substrate-independent (and genes are not) is just wrong - *if* you adopt this perspective on genes - since they are substrate-independent too. If you don't adopt this perspective then you aren't using the word "gene" in the same way as it was intended by Dawkins and the other meme proponents.

You've ducked answering the question as to what it is - if both are essentially genes with both carrying heritable information - that makes them operationally distinct?If the answer is that the one resides within the organism physically and the other resides outside somewhere in the culture non physically, then they are not at all the same in any of the ways that you have claimed they are.

There are a range of well-known differences between memes and DNA-genes - memes have been more easily written to by intelligent agents historically, they have tended to be stored on different media, and have a different evolutionary history. Of course, with the advent of genetic engineering, the traditional demarcation lines between memes and DNA-genes are busy blurring.

That was the most equivocal answer yet as to what makes two operationally identical items intrinsically different. And yes, you have affirmed that they must reside in different areas entirely, and have (again) not explained how physically formed genes, a la memes, can reside outside of the physical forms of biological creatures at all.

DNA genes are floating out there in the culture, are they? What do bacteria do, eat them, or inhale them, absorb them as long lost kin, or what? Maybe they're relying on us to inject them with DNA vaccines, is that it?

Two conclusion from this are that, firstly, culture comes first and codes with memes thereafter. Secondly, the meme concept says nothing that is not equally well said in prior and better established and understood terms like 'idea'.

Finally, if meme was an operational concept of research, we'd find it in abundance in research papers in the neurosciences or cultural sciences. Instead, there is hardly anything.

One thing I found was a patent proposal for identifying "facial memes" meaning the sort of thing everybody knows from t-shirts with the pattern of black patches that are easily idetified by everybody as Che Guevara's face. The patent proposal is futile in my opinion, because human brains are much better 'machines' for identifying these 'facial memes'. In conclusion, the meme concept does nothing constructive in furthering research. As a catch-word it is not as sexy as paradigm and will probably soom become a paleologism (neologism fallen out of use).

Academics have typically adopted a range of meme synonyms - such as "cultural variant". Search for "meme synonyms" to get at the list of such variations - if you are sincerely doing literature searches in the hope of learning something about the topic.

Memes differ from ideas and concepts by virtue of being socially-transmitted. Have you tried searching for "meme" on the internet? The results of doing that are hard to explain if the word is as useless and redundant as you claim. You seem totally unfamiliar with the scientific literature on the topic - and I don't think that you have thought your position through properly.

"The memetic explanation of altruism invokes brains being hijacked by cultural symbionts, which manipulate their hosts into behaviours that help to propagate themselves. In particular, they stimulate social behaviour that prmotes contact between their hosts."I don't think that's how culture operates.

Regarding the footnote, I seem to recall a discussion about this issue last year on the "This Week in Virology" podcast, although some of this had to do with "unpublished data". Here is a link to some of the discussion that was on their blog:

> That seems a teensy bit muddled - but he at least fairly clearly acknowledges the validity of memetic models and terminology. <

And that validity would consist of...?

Crude,

> You said in a previous comment that you were going to tell Churchland that you thought eliminative materialism was silly. Did you do this? Just curious. <

No, her talk wasn't about that at all, and unfortunately she was at the conference only a few hours. Next time. (Incidentally, I don't think elim. mat. is silly, I just think it's misguided and not particularly useful.)

Glad you do not think eliminative materialism is silly. (So-called) intelligent design theory, creationism, homeopathy, and your colleagues' problems with your blogging about the conference is silly, not eliminative materialism.

Whether one in the end rejects a theory -- scientific or otherwise -- on grounds that it is misguided / unfruitful / a simplicity disaster (whatever) does not entail that one thinks the theory silly, i.e. so obviously wrong that little comment is required. In brief, one can reject a theory whilst respecting it as genuine intellectual effort.

That said, I do not at all find eliminative materialism misguided, and I look forward to debating the issue with Massimo, you, and others when the opportunity arises.

My thesaurus shows another word for silly is misguided. Other words for misguided are worse than silly. All of which are mild compared to what some such as Fodor think of eliminative materialism. I understand the work that goes into these determinations, but silly and misguided premises make the work that attempts to validate them hard indeed. Very hard to eliminate provincial ideas successfully when you have little more than hope in the future of discovery to replace them